Fittingly, they're making the announcement at the University of
California at San Francisco's Genentech Hall, a building named
after one of the Bay Area's biotech standouts.

Those names are tech royalty. Milner, the head of DST Group, made
a prescient private investment in Facebook
that has grown almost tenfold in value. Zuckerberg is the
cofounder of Facebook, and is married to Chan, a physician who
graduated from Stanford's medical school last year. Brin is the
cofounder of Google; he
is married to Wojcicki, who is the cofounder of a biotech
startup, 23andMe.

Chairing the foundation behind the prize is Art Levinson, the
former CEO of Genentech who is now chairman of Apple's board.

Eleven scientists are getting $3 million apiece, and the backers
of the prize are making five annual $3 million grants going
forward. (Prize recipients will form a selection committee to
determine future winners.)

It's a small piece of their respective fortunes, but these tech
billionaires are making a statement.

Consumer Internet startups seem to be all that grip people's
imaginations these days, with angel investors banking the small
fortunes they made in the past decade's IPOs into social, mobile
startup ideas they feel comfortable with.

But it is also a monumental challenge to get a large number of
people focused on the life sciences. Biotech moves on a slower
time scale than information technology. And while Silicon
Valley's biotech industry is strong, it is still poorly
integrated into the rest of the tech economy, with glaringly
little exchange of ideas between the sectors.

Of late, eye-catching, multimillion-dollar prizes have become a
popular way to get people focused on new sectors deemed too risky
for traditional venture-capital investment, like space
exploration or robot cars—witness the X Prize and the DARPA
Challenge.

So the Breakthrough billionaires are proposing something simple:
Less talk. More money. That might actually make a difference.